You don’t need to wrestle with iTunes in order to get music onto your iPhone. There are several alternative methods and workarounds, from full-on media transfer replacements to cloud-based workarounds and direct media playback.

You’ll still need to use iTunes to sync your iPhone, but you can sever ties with Apple’s bloated device manager when it comes to personal entertainment.

Use the iTunes iOS App

Perfect for: iTunes customers who have purchased media from Apple in the past.

If you’re a loyal iTunes customer, and you have media purchases tied to your account, you can download music while avoiding the desktop app entirely. Provided your device is signed in to the same Apple ID you used to buy your music, you can simply open the iTunes Store app on your iPhone or iPad and head to More > Purchased > Music to see your catalogue.

From here you can hit the cloud icon next to your music to download it. You can also purchase more music on the Music tab if you want to, then access it on any of your devices.

Alternative Library Managers

Perfect for: Copying music to your core iOS library, for use with the default Music app and other apps that provide media playback functionality. As this is a third party method, there is some risk involved.

Your iPhone stores its music in a media library, for which the Music app is essentially a front-end. Music that is stored in the core iOS library is easy to implement into other apps, which is how workout apps allow you to listen to music while receiving audio feedback at the same time.

It’s the way Apple designed music to work on your device, with iTunes serving as the entry-point for new files. There are a growing number of apps that write directly to this library, providing the “full fat” iOS music experience without the need for iTunes. The one drawback is that these are unofficial, so there’s a slight chance things will go wrong.

There are many apps that offer this sort of functionality, but we’ve not tested them all: CopyTrans, Wondershare MobileGo, iMusic from iSkysoft, and AnyTrans to name but a few. They’re all a bit steep in terms of price, but most offer a free trial so you can make sure they work as you expect.

Streaming Music Services

Perfect for: Quickly building a music library from a cloud-based catalogue, with a monthly fee for accessing as much as you want.

Some even allow you to specify the quality of music you stream and download, allowing you to choose between quality and economy, and higher bitrates or more available space. The biggest drawback with streaming services is availability — if you can’t find it in the catalogue, you can’t listen to it. Most services come with a free trial, so make sure you’re happy before you pay.

Local Media Players

Local media players are different to library managers like WALTR because they don’t write data to your core iOS library. Instead the files are stored in app storage, and are only available to the app you used to import them. The best example of a media player that plays local files is the excellent VLC for Mobile.

Store Music in the Cloud

Perfect for: Those with a healthy collection who want to access it on-the-go, users with plenty of spare cloud storage.

If you want to store your own personal music collection in the cloud, for access on virtually any device, you might want to look into a cloud solution. The drawback here is that you’ll need a decent amount of cloud storage space, which means paying some sort of subscription once you exceed your free allotment.

One of the best solutions is a Dropbox exclusive, using a free app called Jukebox [No longer available]. The app scans your Dropbox account for music files, then asks you what you want to import locally. It then sorts your files for you and allows you to play them offline. To add more music to your device simply upload it to Dropbox and import using Jukebox again.

There are solutions for virtually every service out there, like Google Play Music. Google’s service provides room for 50,000 personal songs for free, and offers a subscription-based music streaming service with 40 million songs ready to go. Amazon has Amazon Music, which is great if you have lots of existing Amazon music purchases as they’ll automatically appear in your account. Amazon also lets you transfer 250 songs for free, with the option to transfer 250,000 for $25 per year.

Finally a combination of Microsoft OneDrive and the Groove [No longer available] streaming app lets you use Microsoft’s own cloud storage for this purpose. You’ll get 15GB of storage for free, or you can fork over $7 per month for “unlimited” space. Load songs into OneDrive on your PC or Mac, then access them using Groove on your iPhone.

Have You Ditched iTunes?

iTunes isn’t quite dead yet. You’ll still need to rely on it for backing up your device locally, restoring backups (though you can restore your phone without iTunes), and syncing apps. The software is arguably less irksome on a Mac than it is on Windows, but in general it would be nice to see Apple overhaul iTunes and move iOS device management to a separate lightweight app.

I use MyAudioStream and can listen music directly from Synology NAS' upnp server, and from ArkMS on Mac mini, even lossless formats. To listed outside my flat, I downloaded some albums. Also it can play music directly to my Sonos speaker. Everything in one place.

Are you kidding? WALTR is the best thing ever happening to my iPhone. If you have some issues, get them resolved with the tech support. You are just misleading people so much right now!
Was using WALTR for so long, me and friends, and it always worked flawlessly!

Hi everyone! I see comments about our product. We're currently developing WALTR and this is a really handy app that allows to copy music and videos to iPhone without iTunes in a very few seconds. There are versions available for Windows and Mac. You don't need to convert or sync your media anymore. Just drag and drop. WALTR is fast and simple in use, makes your life to be easier. Give it a try!

These ways of syncing music to iphone without iTunes are really worth for transferring music from iphone, being easy to use because of its intuitive interface but what about contacts, SMS, emails of iphone or what to do when they have to be synced.

ShareTunes just changed my life! It seems like such a simple program and it works so perfect! Thank you!

Is anyone else tired of hearing the Apple maniacs pretend not to understand why we don't want to use iTunes? No one is that stupid. They are just stubborn and I'm so tired of hearing their BS. It's all good now though. I can finally control the music going onto and off of my iPhone without iTunes deleting my personal collection.

Be aware. I wasn't able to get pwnplayer running on 3.1.2 and it simply crashes before start counting seconds of warning menu. (installed from cydia)
I use dTunes now (took me half an hour to find pwnplayer alternative). dTunes supports torrent downloads ;-)

Here is the step by step guide shows (dvd-video-soft.com/dvdvideoguide/transfer-songs-from-ipod-itouch-iphone-to-computer-or-itunes.html) how to add audio and video files from your PC to your iPod/iPhone, such as music and movie.

Kash - Try "ImToo iPhone Transfer"...works great, I'm still using the trial period version because Im a cheap bastard. After transfering about a hundred files, it will only add one file at a time, but is still free. Also you can try "iPhonebrowser"...you can drag and drop files in or out but it's a bit more complicated...Good luck

iphones are the best tech. I have seen it's like a mini computer really, itunes slows my computer down to a crawl and software unlocked iphones can cause your phone to brick if you dont know what you are doing LOL...

Supports iPhone+iPod, converts folder.jpg to iTunesDB format (no need to embed art in tags and waste space), converts Replaygain to Apple SoundCheck, transcodes non-supported formats, can copy songs back to PC, and is as simple as right clicking and selecting "Send to iPod".

Odd that you preface the article with a moan about there being little in the way of offerings for Linux users, and so of the 6 solutions proposed, 1 is specifically for Linux and is afforded less real estate than any of the others, 1 is for any platform but requires jailbreaking, and all 4 of the remaining ones are for Windows? This article should be replaced with an instruction to run a search on Google: it'd be more informative and balanced.

Of course, you could always buy an mp3 player from a company that isn't obsessed with stifling creativity and consumer rights with soul-sucking DRM and built-in platform dependence.
My Android phone works with every computer I plug it into, so long as it supports plugging a thumb drive in.

This article is misleading and full of teh suckness. It starts out by talking about linux users who can't sync, but then talks about 4 windows only apps(2 of which don't work), 1 any platform(as long as its an iphone), and 1 linux app (but you have to be "geeky and advantageous enough"). WTF?

I hate comments, but I hate this article more. Totally Wucking Forthless!